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| Savuti sunrise, a present I gave to my mother many years ago. © Shafiq Morton |
AS a journalist, I’ve often had to deal with the sad detritus
of human life. It’s those small – but moving – details discovered in the
wreckage of war, famine, tsunami or earthquake that hint at more.
It could be a shoe, a toy, or a table laid for an unfinished
meal – ghostly symbols of what was and what could have been. I first became
aware of this when covering the “Witdoek” clashes in Cape Town’s squatter camps
in the late 1980’s.
What I recall of the deadly township war between the young United
Democratic Front comrades and the state supported white-scarved elders is not
the panga-wielding mobs, but rather, a school exercise-book.
One morning I can remember being called out to Crossroads
where “Tambo Square” had been razed to the ground. The comrades had disappeared,
and I could see a group of Witdoeke in the distance.
I spotted a school exercise-book lying in the dirt and
picked it up. Its curled pages revealed the script of a young learner. It made me think: who exactly was this child? It changed my perspective on reporting. Cliché,
maybe, but for me that exercise-book was the real story of what had happened.
It taught me that there’s much to be observed in the small
things, and that with their subtle coding, one could learn a lot. Those little
details were what informed your greater experience.
In 2006 in Beirut I had a similar encounter. Scrambling
through the rubble of the bombed-out Dahiye neighbourhood, I found a partly
melted doll in the ruins of a ten-story building. It had been flattened by a
“smart bomb” dropped from 30, 000 feet.
Seven years (and several more conflicts later) I found
myself looking for meaning via the pieces of yet another life. Except that this
time, it was personal: 24 hours previously my mother had closed her eyes for
the last time and gracefully gone to meet her Creator.
We have to go through her things. Executors and debtors are
waiting, and her affairs have to be sorted out. It’s hard, because her presence
is everywhere. Her smells still linger – the soap, the linen and the potpourri. But she’s not sitting in her
favourite chair by the window. Her absence reminds me of the exercise-book and
the doll.
It’s really difficult; her things have to be boxed, papers
sorted, furniture moved and curtains taken down. As I pack things away, fragments
of my own life start to emerge. It’s strange. I’m looking for my mother, yet
the more I look for her, the more I keep on discovering bits of myself.
In a dusty file I find all my school reports, from
kindergarten to high school. They tell a tale of a somewhat dreamy lad who was
useless at Maths, better at English and History, and un-cooperative in Bible
studies.
My Maths appears to have caused many a headache, one teacher
complaining about my stubbornness. Then it comes back. I remember suggesting to
him that formulas were a waste of time in geometry – wouldn’t it be far easier
if we just measured things, sir?
I come across an exasperated headmaster, warning in matric that
I would become a “dilettante”, he adding that I was an “exceptional boy” who needed
to focus. His comment, I suspect, was simply hinting at old-fashioned laziness.
As I sift through the file, photographs tumble out. I used
to send my mother prints of my favourites, and she’d kept them all: my wedding
and the children as they grew up; my daughter’s birth and matric dance, my son
bathing in the kitchen sink and his guitar, the Botswana sunrise and the reed
church in the Namib Desert.
The doorbell sounds and people from the village come to
offer condolences. My mother was active to the end, and having worked at a
public hospital for 30 years, she had touched many. Hers was the shoulder they cried
on.
Cupboards are opened and a pile of tiny jerseys and beanies tumble
out. My mother always knitted, sewed or made things, and I remember her knitting
for AIDs orphans.
Clearing bookshelves I still can’t escape traces of myself. I find a copy of John Barrie’s Peter Pan. It takes me back to my first book
experiences. It’s illustrated with delicate pencil drawings, drawings that had
fired my young imagination long before the opiate of television.
It’s then that I realise the consistent finding of my identity
in the little things around me is because as her eldest son, I am part of her.
She was herself through my brother and sister and me and her grandchildren, and
we were ourselves through her.
Yes, we all miss her very, very much: her caring, her
tinkling laughter, her home-made ice-cream and her intrepid, energetic, loving,
generous and creative spirit. I am consoled by the fact that it was time for
her to go, and time for us to let her go. For as the poet George Barker once
wrote, let the mourning pass into morning.
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